Semiconductors, or computer chips, are found in virtually every electrical product manufactured today. Chips are used not only in very sophisticated industrial and commercial electronic equipment, but also in many household and consumer items such as televisions, clothes washers and dryers, radios, and telephones. As products become smaller but more functional, there is a need to include more chips in the smaller products to perform the functionality. The reduction in size of cellular telephones is one example of how more and more capabilities are incorporated into smaller and smaller electronic products.
As electrical devices become increasingly miniaturized, integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing techniques are used to form traditional electrical circuit components such as capacitors, resistors, inductors, filters, and interconnects directly upon a silicon or silicon-like substrate. For example, many of the devices in today's portable wireless products are passive components, and the integration of passive components into a substrate can provide significant performance, cost, and size advantages. Similarly, the integration of IC chips such as memory and logic devices into a substrate or a connected device provides additional benefit as it too minimizes manufacturing costs while increasing performance.
Although preferable, the integration of several passive devices formed on a wafer with other chips and packages can present many challenges. Today's manufacturing processes require the use of expensive, specialty substrate materials when forming SiP devices having IPDs. Further, if the device combines semiconductor components manufactured using thin-film processes and printed circuit board (PCB) components, the manufacturing process may be subject to significant temperature limitations that increase the difficulty and cost of manufacture. Also, in today's SiP devices, any connected IC chips are generally limited to a 2D layout configuration. As a result, the number of IC chips that can be coupled directly to a substrate is greatly limited in accordance with the geometry of the substrate. If components or additional devices are mounted to a backside of a substrate using conventional technologies, it may be necessary to use through substrate vias (TSVs) to electrically connect the components to the internal electrical structure of the substrate. TSVs are difficult and expensive to produce, so their use greatly increases the cost of the completed device. Finally, when combining a semiconductor substrate with a PCB, significant difficulties can arise due to differing coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE) between the components.